Bookmarks (15)

With yesterday’s My Prayer, for the first time I can remember in two decades of blogging, I put up a new post with the comments section completely turned off. I did so because I knew my nerves couldn’t handle a triumphant interrogation from Trumpist commenters about whether, in the wake of their Messiah’s (near-)blood sacrifice […]

It is the duty of good people, always and everywhere, to condemn, reject, and disavow the use of political violence. Even or especially when evildoers would celebrate the use of political violence against us. It is our duty always to tell the truth, always to play by the rules — even when evil triumphs by […]

Perhaps like the poor current President of the United States, I can feel myself fading, my memory and verbal facility and attention to detail failing me, even while there’s so much left to do to battle the nonsense in the world. I started my career on an accelerated schedule—going to college at 15, finishing my […]

The news these days feels apocalyptic to me—as if we’re living through, if not the last days of humanity, then surely the last days of liberal democracy on earth. All the more reason to ignore all of that, then, and blog instead about the notorious Busy Beaver function! Because holy moly, what news have I […]

Dana, the kids, and I got back to the US last week after a month spent in England and then Israel. We decided to visit Israel because … uhh, we heard there’s never been a better time. We normally go every year to visit Dana’s family and our many friends there, and to give talks. […]

(See here for Boaz Barak’s obituary) Luca Trevisan, one of the world’s leading theoretical computer scientists, has succumbed to cancer in Italy, at only 52 years old. I was privileged to know Luca for a quarter-century, first as my complexity theory and cryptography professor at UC Berkeley and as a member of my dissertation committee, […]

My friend Leopold Aschenbrenner, who I got to know and respect on OpenAI’s now-disbanded Superalignment team before he left the company under disputed circumstances, just released “Situational Awareness,” one of the most extraordinary documents I’ve ever read. With unusual clarity, concreteness, and seriousness, and with a noticeably different style than the LessWrongers with whom he […]

Three times in my life, I’ve gone to museums where I had such a horrifying experience, and was treated by museum staff with such blankfaced contempt, that the only way I could restore any feeling of cosmic justice was to use this blog to impose some cost on the museum for what it did to […]

I am, of course, sad that Jan Leike and Ilya Sutskever, the two central people who recruited me to OpenAI and then served as my “bosses” there—two people for whom I developed tremendous admiration—have both now resigned from the company. Ilya’s resignation followed the board drama six months ago, but Jan’s resignation last week came […]

When I learned of Jim Simons’s passing, I was actually at the Simons Foundation headquarters in lower Manhattan, for the annual board meeting of the unparalleled Quanta Magazine, which Simons founded and named. The meeting was interrupted to share the sad news, before it became public … and then it was continued, because that’s obviously […]

Unrelated Announcements: See here for a long interview with me in The Texas Orator, covering the usual stuff (quantum computing, complexity theory, AI safety). And see here for a podcast with me and Spencer Greenberg about a similar mix of topics. A couple weeks ago, I helped organize UmeshFest: Don’t Miss This Flight, a workshop […]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – From the university campuses of Assyria to the thoroughfares of Ur to the palaces of the Hittite Empire, students across the Fertile Crescent have formed human chains, camel caravans, and even makeshift tent cities to protest the oppression of innocent Egyptians by the rogue proto-nation of “Israel” and its vengeful, warlike […]

For those who don’t yet know from their other social media: a week ago the cryptographer Yilei Chen posted a preprint, eprint.iacr.org/2024/555, claiming to give a polynomial-time quantum algorithm to solve lattice problems. For example, it claims to solve the GapSVP problem, which asks to approximate the length of the shortest nonzero vector in a […]

I can’t find it now, but nearly 20 years ago, in the midst of an unusually stupid debate in the comment section of Lance Fortnow and Bill Gasarch’s blog, someone chimed in: “the argument about who’s the world’s most badass theoretical computer scientist is officially over. Wigderson owns you. You can all go home, punks.” […]

Pissing away my life in a haze of doomscrolling, sporadic attempts to “parent” two rebellious kids, and now endless conversations about AI safety, I’m liable to forget for days that I’m still mostly known (such as I am) as a quantum computing theorist, and this blog is still mostly known as a quantum computing blog. […]